Re-Imagining Apartheid: Making Guilt Visible in Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City (2010) Sara Martín Alegre Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona 2015
[email protected] NOTE: This is the presentation I offered at the International Conference Relations and Networks in Indian Ocean Writing, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain, November 26th - 27th 2015. .Award-winning, best- selling novelist. .Also writes comics, graphic novels, screenplays, TV shows and occasionally journalism. Author of: .Broken Monsters (2014) .The Shining Girls (2013) .Zoo City (2010) .Moxyland (2008) .Maverick: Extraordinary Women From South Africa’s Past (2005) Lauren Beukes (rhymes with Lucas), a former journalist, is a popular South-African novelist with quite a varied career as a writer. Sara Martín Alegre, Re-Imagining Apartheid: Making Guilt Visible in Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City (2010) 1 First African Arthur C. Clarke winner (2011) Although her first novel–the cyberpunk tale Moxyland, set in Cape Town–is a much better work, her acclaimed second novel Zoo City was the first African winner of the Arthur C. Clarke, the prestigious British award for fantasy and science fiction. The award highlights not just the novel itself but Beukes’s spearheading of new trends welcoming fantasy and science-fiction into the diverse African Literatures in English. Sara Martín Alegre, Re-Imagining Apartheid: Making Guilt Visible in Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City (2010) 2 . Urban fantasy novel . Premise: the guilty conscience of criminals can materialize into familiars, provided they accept their guilt (the Undertow is the terrifying alternative, also the ultimate destiny) . Unclear whether the Zoo Plague or “AAF or Acquired Aposymbiotic Familiarism” (79) is supernatural .